


You Would Never Call Me Baby

by inkforhumanhands



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blow Jobs, Catholic Matt Murdock, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Sex, Foggy Nelson Is a Good Bro, Happy Ending, Human Disaster Matt Murdock, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson at Columbia, POV Matt Murdock, Panic Attacks, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Available, Poetic, Prose Poem, Self-Hatred, Self-Worth Issues, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:34:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29978820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkforhumanhands/pseuds/inkforhumanhands
Summary: “I’m—Foggy, I’m not good for you. I’m notgood.”Matt reacts badly to Foggy asking him out one night in their dorm room.
Relationships: Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson
Comments: 27
Kudos: 64





	You Would Never Call Me Baby

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by the Perfume Genius song ["Hood"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOpkr8uNWpk).
> 
> Podfic available [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29979033)
> 
> Also a huge thanks to happybeans for being the best cheer reader around! This probably would have taken me five more months if you hadn't given me so much incentive to finish! <3

_You would never call me baby_

_If you knew me truly_

_Underneath this hood you kiss_

_I tick like a bomb_

\- Perfume Genius

Matt pulled away from Foggy. Or maybe it was pushed away from Foggy; who could be sure about bodies and limbs and directions at such a pivotal moment as this? He fought to keep his face neutral. But as he soon realized—panic and disgust at once crashing as waves might through his features—God had screwed up somewhere when He implemented free will for some actions and not others. It wasn’t right that his face could just show things like that.

The first words out of his mouth were, “ _No_ , Foggy,” and they sounded like they were meant for scolding a dog. Maybe God had screwed up a lot more designing him than Matt had initially given Him credit for. His words’ effect on Foggy came out in a huff of disbelieving breath.

“Jeez, Matt,” Foggy said, and before that Matt would have maintained that it was impossible to hear hurt—not the intimation of it but the meat of it, anyway. There it was, though, forcibly swept up and along by the currents of his voice. He wanted to plug his ears and staunch the flow. He wanted to reinstate the thin bit of distance that had always protected them from each other. Twenty seconds into whatever this was and he was already wretched.

It turned out Foggy hadn’t yet finished. “If I’d known you were gonna react like that I would’ve happily taken it to the grave.”

A pause for a wince or a grimace or some other expression that might telegraph his disdain.

“Ever hear of letting a guy down gently?” Try as he might to mask it in sarcasm, a bitterness tinged his reproach that was as incongruous to Foggy as black coffee would be to a sweet tooth like him.

“No, Foggy,” Matt started again, and hadn’t he done enough damage with that the first time? He brought his hands up to his face in his guilt. “I mean,” he said through the spaces between his fingers, “you _can’t_.”

Foggy’s already thunderously quick heartbeat kicked into even higher gear where it pounded in Matt’s ears, and a hazy sort of heat floated toward him from where he gathered Foggy’s face to be. His skin creaked like leather to indicate the bunching of his hands into fists. Matt would have done better to expect anything other than for his statement to be met with anger. What was it, thirty seconds now and Foggy was surely about to take his confession back?

“Are you fucking serious?” All traces of Foggy’s once-seemingly-endless patience with Matt had disappeared, and Matt was left with the reckoning he truly deserved. Want didn’t have a place here. He leaned into the abuse he thought was coming the same way he might lean into a hand tenderly cupping his jaw. Beat him bloody if he wouldn’t let you pollute yourself with him. It was the only form of intimacy he’d allow himself. Penance for being the way he was: too broken.

“It’s one thing to say no, even if the way you went about it was a little bit rude, if I’m being honest here,” Foggy continued with vitriol. “Your best friend says he likes you. It’s surprising. I get it. But it’s another thing entirely to say I’m not _allowed_ to like you. Because what? Being bisexual is gross?”

Matt raised his head sharply from where it had been hanging downward. “That’s not it. I promise.” If there was a single thing he needed Foggy to not misunderstand, it was this. So why did his voice sound so small and insignificant against the thrumming of blood through both of their veins?

“If that isn’t what you mean then you need to clarify right now,” Foggy demanded.

Matt flinched. He was only good at words when they didn’t pertain to him. He advocated for other people, not himself. Still, he had to try, lest Foggy walk out that door like so many others. He took a shaky breath, opened his mouth—went through all the steps that people went through when they talked—but nothing came out.

A rustle across from him gave away an agitated hand’s passage through long hair, a thing Foggy did whenever he was put on hold. (It was preferable, at least, to his grabbing two fistfuls of it and resting his forehead in the heels of his palms. That they weren’t there yet might be a miracle.)

Matt tried again. “It’s not you; it’s me.” Foggy inhaled furiously through his nose, and Matt held his hands out to stave off the interruption. It was a mark of how little he knew how to say this if he was falling back on clichés, but he suspected subtleties like that would be lost on Foggy at this point. “I’m—Foggy, I’m not good for you. I’m not _good_.”

His hands, which had been cradling the air in front of his chest, dropped back down to rest on his folded legs where he sat on the dorm floor. He interlaced his fingers and squeezed till it hurt.

The breath Foggy had never let go reappeared with a strangled noise of confusion in tow. “Matt…,” he said helplessly. The air shifted around his arm where he reached out to touch Matt’s shoulder. Matt tensed. Foggy withdrew it before it had a chance to land.

“You know, that’s not true. Like at all.”

“Yes, it _is_.” He squeezed his fingers together harder; the joints bit into each other. If Foggy didn’t see it he was as blind as Matt was.

Foggy hummed, and Matt readied himself for the list of his good qualities that Foggy would undoubtedly produce. For having been so angry only a minute ago, Foggy seemed to have settled back into his role as best friend without too much whiplash. Matt took a moment to be impressed before counting it as another among the things he didn’t deserve.

“Alright, well. Forgive me for being obvious, but would a not-good person take the brunt of a moving truck for someone they didn’t know?”

Matt scoffed. He knew the question was asked in good faith. Even so, the contrary, self-loathing part of him couldn’t help but hear it as a challenge to be taken up. “I was a kid! I had no concept of my own mortality, much less lifelong disability!”

The thing was, Matt had already relied too often on this story that made him a martyr, used it to prop himself up in his lowest moments until it had lost its potency. He’d had too many chances to revisit it, to revise the memory from his current standpoint. Too many opportunities to ransack it of all his agency. Matt had remade himself into less a hero and more a boy caught up in heroics. His accident could no longer be the proof Foggy thought it was—the proof Matt, too, longed for it to be.

“Okay,” Foggy said, not like he agreed but like he was acknowledging a potential landmine. “Let’s say that’s true, then. That doesn’t change anything I know about the Matt I’ve roomed with for two years,” he insisted. “The Matt who organized that study group first year even though he didn’t need it? Yeah, I noticed you set it up right after that chapter everyone was complaining about, _and_ that you’d aced the test,” he said pointedly when Matt’s face betrayed him again, this time with surprise. “Or how about the Matt who stayed up with me the night my grandma died even though it meant turning in his Civil Procedure paper late? Buddy, those are things good people do. You make sacrifices all the time.”

Matt shook his head. “A sacrifice requires net loss. You’re not taking into account what I gained when I did all that stuff. I did it because I wanted you to like me, to—to _ingratiate_ myself with you.” He shuddered in revulsion, hands coming unclasped to rub agitatedly at the back of his neck. “And not just you,” he went on. “Those were things I did so I could like myself. I had selfish reasons.” Words were coming back to him.

A silence that was really only silent for one of them bloomed between Matt and Foggy while the latter formulated what should have been his rebuttal.

“I’m looking at you in dismay, Matty.”

Matt shook his head again like that was the only thing he knew how to do. “You’re wrong, Foggy. You’re wrong.”

This time, Foggy’s hand made it the full distance to Matt’s shoulder, where he gave it a firm squeeze. “Matt, those reasons don’t negate the good that you—yes, _you_ —did. _Do_. They can coexist. None of us is pure, for God’s sake.”

“You don’t get it.” Matt brushed Foggy’s hand away. “You—You’re always—You only see what you want to see.” He began to rock back and forth from the waist up. “You’ve completely misinterpreted everything that I am.” His voice came out wet.

“Explain to me, then. Tell me about the parts I’m missing.”

Matt sucked a breath in through his teeth. There was so much.

He had been baptized; that wasn’t the point. For what was original sin if not original to Matt? Even before his dad was killed he’d appropriated it for himself, perverting what was conceived as a blanket trait of all humanity into a deep well of his own anxiety. He drew up buckets to paint himself black. Matt couldn’t be tempted by the devil because it was already in his nature.

No amount of prayer could cancel out that kind of anger, singular in its intensity yet multiple in its focus. Through it his sin corrupted his sense of self, until he’d taken it out on his body. If he’d convinced himself God would never forgive him for that, how, possibly, could Foggy?

“Foggy, I really don’t think—”

“What? That I can handle whatever messed up shit is going on in your head? Matt, you don’t get to just cop out like that, okay?”

Matt’s lips stayed hopelessly shut. He slid a hand up under his T-shirt sleeve and ran his finger pads over the raised bits of skin on his shoulder. He didn’t even know what they must look like, if they had faded into white or if they were still pink like a slap. Were they even visible if you weren’t looking for them? He blinked, hard, in distaste as the thought crossed his mind that he hoped Foggy might find them someday. Could he get any more pathetic?

Never a fan of silences, uncomfortable or otherwise, Foggy spoke again to fill the current one. “Maybe it’s selfish of me; I don’t know. I don’t want to force you into a conversation you clearly don’t want to have. But if I can bring you around to my perspective for one second maybe you’ll see where I’m coming from.”

Matt nodded once, still rubbing his scars absently.

“Okay. You’re me. Foggy Nelson,” he said, trying anew for levity. “You’ve been hosting a debate in your head for a solid year about whether you’re going to bother asking out your crush when it’s obvious you’re on a one-way ticket to heartbreak. I mean, he’s a total babe and he’s got a head full of _ideals_ and you’re pretty sure he might actually kill to protect your honor—”

Matt smiled a pained sort of smile.

“But all of that means he’s definitely out of your league. So the debate rages on until finally you decide ‘fuck it’ and you tell him you like him.” Foggy took a beat to catch his breath. The more he spoke the less mileage each inhalation got him. “And you’ve prepared yourself for this, the inevitable moment when he tells you he’s not interested. It’s going to be painful, sure, but at least at the end of it you’ll have your answer.

“And he says no, and that’s what you thought you were gonna get anyway but it still hurts and…and before you can even properly feel that pain he twists it into something else. Something darker. Because you learn that the way he sees himself doesn’t line up with how you see him, and that’s so much worse. He doesn’t think he’s worthy of love, which is _such_ bullshit, if we’re keeping score.”

“Foggy…”

“Look, Matt. If you’d said you weren’t interested I would’ve dropped it, but as it is I can’t leave this thread hanging and go back and pretend like everything’s normal, like you’re not hurting, because I see it now. And I’d be a bad friend if I tried to un-see it. I wish you would just trust me enough to let me in a little bit.”

Matt dug his thumb into the divot where his shoulder met his collarbone, and his knuckle emitted a sickening crack. He retracted his hand self-consciously, the sensation lingering in his joint and the noise rattling around in his eardrums. Giving Foggy what he wanted from him should be easy. All he had to do was talk, but he knew how it would sound. He was suddenly very tired. He pinched the bridge of his nose, displacing his glasses, and let the elbow he had digging into his thigh carry the weight of his head. He shut his eyes.

He stayed like that for several moments, fragments of things he might say flitting one after the other through the empty theater of his brain. Tens of failed auditions later and nothing to show for it, he figured that if he didn’t at least shift positions soon Foggy might assume he’d fallen asleep. He settled for opening his eyes.

Foggy raked another hand through his hair. “Buddy, can you give me something to work with? Please?”

Spurred on by his friend’s desperate tone, Matt found it in himself finally to formulate some kind of an answer. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like…there’s the Matt I show people, the—the Matt you think is nice. And then there’s this other Matt on the inside, and well…he’s angry. And that’s all he’s good for. He’s _mean_. He’s —he’s hypocritical. He’s exactly the things he pretends to hate. He likes to think it’s injustice that sets him off but really it’s anything.” Matt angled his face away from Foggy, who listened with patient ears. “It could even be you, Foggy,” he said, quieter now, and then swallowed before sitting up straighter.

“Sometimes I come back from class and you’re passed out taking a nap and I actually get mad!” He shook his head in exasperation, shoulders crowding in close to his neck as he started to work himself up. His gesticulating hands, in motion though they were, moved with a kind of jerky restraint. “Can you believe that? I get so fucking jealous that you allow yourself to take breaks when you need to that it comes out as anger. It’s so _stupid_. It doesn’t make any fucking sense. Why do I need to feel like that towards the one person I never want to feel that way about? Isn’t that a fucked up way to feel about the person you like?” Matt panted after not having taken a proper breath during his screed.

“That’s a lot of F-bombs for Matt Murdock,” Foggy observed.

Matt scrunched his face. He hadn’t expected his colorful language to be the part Foggy would fixate on. He _had_ just let slip his feelings for him, right? He trained his senses on Foggy’s heartbeat, conveniently ignoring his abysmal batting average when it came to using it to read Foggy’s mind. Surely enough, fast but steady and counter to the way this conversation had started, it spilled no secrets. But maybe Matt needed to reevaluate his own headspace. The words he could only assume Foggy was dutifully neglecting in favor of Matt’s more volatile feelings had come out by accident, sure, but now that they were here they clamored for his attention.

Foggy—consistent to a fault, Matt thought—went on ignoring them. “Sounds like someone needed to tell you this a long time ago, but, Matt, you don’t have a monopoly on anger. And that includes misdirected anger,” he said.

Matt opened his mouth to speak in what was more of a kneejerk reaction to being spoken to than a sign that he had anything to say back. Foggy, thankfully, intercepted him. “There are times I’ve been mad at you too, you know.”

At Foggy’s flippant statement a flash of intense panic ripped through Matt’s gut and his chest and the back of his head all at once. He struggled to conceal how hard it was getting to breathe, suddenly, forcing out a, “Why?”

It was a stupid question in more ways than one. What reason did anyone need to be irritated at Matt, really? Stick had shown him ample evidence that he could do pretty much anything and the end result would be the same: another empty space where someone used to be. Matt was a plague on all who knew him. And then, what would being able to identify whatever he’d done to piss off Foggy do, anyway, other than give him something to agonize over for the rest of eternity? Matt might not have a solid grasp on all his emotions but he did know himself well enough to figure that much. No, it was better to remain ignorant.

He’d already asked the question, though, and that meant Foggy would answer it, was answering it, already had the words poised on his tongue and there was no way to stop them from being articulated now. Vertigo gripped and then spun Matt’s head ruthlessly like a child with a pinwheel, until he was processing the sounds vibrating straight off of Foggy’s vocal cords before they’d had the chance to be shaped into meaning by his lips. This slightest of time discrepancies bled into the natural rhythm of his chest, and his lungs seemed to stutter. Everything whirled and swelled and shuddered around him.

Foggy was saying something, and Matt wasn’t listening. Matt was reaching out, feeling for the ground with his hands. Matt was gasping for air, too shallow, too shallow. Matt was pressing himself up against the wall behind him, and thank God it at least was still solid. Foggy was saying something, and Matt wasn’t listening.

“Matt? Matt!”

Ten points of warm pressure guided Matt back to Foggy. He sought the hands wrapped firmly around his upper arms with his own. When they connected it was like resurfacing after too much time spent underwater. The shock of someone else’s skin injected fresh air back into Matt’s lungs, and it was all too easy to crave more. It was only then that he realized he had been drowning.

Matt glided his palms tentatively across the backs of Foggy’s hands, following the perpendicular guide formed for him by the bones that lay beneath Foggy’s skin. Foggy’s breath hitched close to his ear as he hooked his fingers into the gaps between Foggy’s thumbs and his arms until they were effectively holding hands, Matt with his thumbs free to skim across Foggy’s knuckles. Matt’s mind went perilously blank, and the last fully-formed thought to take shape there was, _Foggy has soft hands_.

Without thoughts and their logic to hold them in check, whims could run amok. Whims like loosening his left grip, whims like locating Foggy’s neck and then his jaw by touch, whims like bringing their faces within a hair’s breadth of each other.

They hovered there for a moment, and Matt’s brain supplied the word _suspended_. In time. Before a headlong drop. Whichever it was, the only way forward was to surrender himself to physics and the physical. Foggy’s breath ghosted over Matt’s lips. Matt’s hand trembled at the side of Foggy’s face. Their lips brushed in what could barely be described as a kiss. It was electric.

Matt’s other hand found its way into Foggy’s hair. He combed his fingers through it once before drifting back to settle his hand on Foggy’s cheek. He was holding Foggy’s face now, couldn’t believe he’d been entrusted with it, felt like he had something sacred and holy in his palms. He should be reverent. He should be chaste. He should let Foggy feel loved, not wanted. Yet there was something to be said for mucking up a clean canvas if you were the dirt.

He gave himself in to it. Matt pressed his lips back to Foggy’s, let himself drag the kiss off-target to the side of his mouth where he blotted the tip of his brush against the paper. Smeared his lips-dipped-in-oil-paints back across, Foggy’s upper lip momentarily caught between them. Licked the other corner of Foggy’s art-project mouth with a dart of his tongue, breath coming out hot and hungry, mouth hanging open like a wound. Matt captured Foggy’s mouth then, smudged the inside of it like a painter armed with a knife. This was art.

And like art, it was messy and hard to do alone. Matt had never felt more held, even if Foggy kept changing up his grip. Fist in the back of his hair. Fingers splayed across his shoulder blade. Thumb outlining red and red and red, and Matt took it into his mouth. He swirled his tongue around Foggy’s thumb and shivered at the small gasp it elicited from him. Was this what it was like to yearn up close? Matt didn’t think he’d be satisfied until every distance that had ever sprung up between their bodies had been closed.

The momentum of another fevered kiss mashed Matt’s glasses into his face, and he cursed the discovery of even one more barrier. He flung them aside and felt an odd sort of satisfaction at the sharp clatter they made against the side of his desk. But what he really wanted, as he sucked a bruise from Foggy’s throat, was to get at the parts of Foggy hidden by his clothes.

Matt repurposed his hands from wherever they’d been; moments had stopped carrying over into the next, and it was hard to escape the present tense. Now, now, now, in search for the hem. Now, now, now, a stretch less fabric between them.

Matt, greedy, tugged Foggy’s shirt upward, eager to get it the whole way off. Warmth from Foggy’s newly-bare skin washed over him, and after kissing Foggy once more on the lips so they didn’t feel neglected, Matt pressed his face into Foggy’s chest. He breathed in. In the hollow where most of Foggy’s chest hair sprang from, the day’s sweat mingled with the lingering scent of soap from his morning shower. Foggy’s sweat ran salty; Matt knew this. But he couldn’t have imagined the way it would tickle his tongue in such close proximity.

Matt followed the scent to where it emanated strongest and nudged Foggy’s arm up a bit with his nose. He breathed in deeply again, only half-worried that Foggy might think he was a weirdo. Judging from the way Foggy swallowed, though, he seemed to be in the clear. He traced a line against the arc of Foggy’s armpit with his tongue, and Foggy gave a start, laughing. Matt interrupted him with another kiss. He unbalanced them both, and they toppled over onto the carpet in what was less chaos and more a controlled descent led by Foggy.

Every time he’d imagined this it had been Matt on his back, Foggy exploring his body. Matt giving himself up for the taking. But just like always, he’d slipped into selfishness. His heart ached for Foggy and what he must think of him as he stared up at his face, at the picture of vulgarity he must see. _Where was the good Catholic boy’s virtue now?_ his inner devil sneered.

“Hey, where’d you go?” prompted Foggy gently from beneath him.

Matt shook his head to clear it out. “I’m still here,” he said, and it was true even if he had to put in the effort to stay there. He sure as hell wasn’t going to allow himself to ruin this—not when Foggy was everything he’d ever wanted, and, more importantly, _he_ was still here.

“Good,” Foggy said, and slid his hands up Matt’s torso underneath the shirt he was still wearing. “I’d hate to stay the only one with my tits out.”

Matt grinned. “Alright, I suppose I can give the fans what they want.” He shifted his weight to one arm and attempted with the other to lift his shirt over his head.

“Graceful,” came well-deserved criticism for having snagged his head somewhere in the torso of the shirt. He thrashed about to more of Foggy’s laughter before a helping hand finally freed him from the trap he’d created for himself. Foggy pulled him by his now-ruffled hair into a kiss of the soft and slow variety. His eyelashes flickered against Matt’s cheek as their lips parted and he opened his eyes again.

Matt put his mouth on Foggy’s neck once more, and Foggy placed a hand on Matt’s naked shoulder, presumably to ground himself so that he didn’t get too lost in the sensation. He went slack against Matt’s chest pressed against him. Matt nipped at his skin in an experiment to see if he’d tighten up again at the shock. He did, and his hand fluttered off Matt’s shoulder.

It was then that Foggy’s heartbeat rang out like a shotgun in a quarry. Matt pulled back off of him a few inches. “Sorry,” he said quickly, having picked up on a subtle change in scent that had him pretty sure Foggy’s heart wasn’t pounding in startled pleasure.

Foggy pushed Matt away so that he had room to sit up and get his bearings. His voice came out higher in pitch than Matt had ever heard it, a thin whine on the cusp of despairing laughter. “Did you—did you get in a fight with a bear at some point this year when I wasn’t looking?”

It wasn’t the first time Foggy had tried to mask some emotion with a joke in Matt’s presence, but it might have been the only time he had been able to place it so clearly for what it was—naked horror. That didn’t mean he was any the faster for it, though. He was slow to make the connection, even with the arm Foggy threw out to point stirring up the air in front of his shoulder. It having dawned on him at last, he moved to cover up his scars, first with a mortified hand and then, having considered his options, with the shirt that lay crumpled by his side. He’d grabbed the wrong one.

Foggy’s shirt hung loose on him, made him feel small again like the kid he’d once been, still processing the light tap of an ice cream wrapper hitting a concrete floor. This was that moment. He’d been a fool to think for even a second that this could have ended any other way. In trying to clear things up for Foggy enough to avoid hurting him, he’d succeeded in doing just the opposite. A foul taste flooded his mouth. The kind of adrenaline that sits unwelcome in your veins made its home in his.

Matt licked his lips to remedy the fact that they’d gone bone dry. “No,” he said. He was afraid both of being too honest and not being honest enough.

“Then what?” Foggy asked faintly.

Matt groped around for the glasses he’d tossed aside earlier and put them back on. He thought it unfair that Foggy seemed to want him to say it out loud even though they both knew the answer to be self-evident. Following a breath to calm his nerves the best he could, he pushed the words in question out, though they clung, sticky, to the walls of his throat.

“I did it.”

Although none of them truly surprised him, Matt found himself flinching at each of the sounds that betrayed Foggy’s reaction. The roots of Foggy’s hair groaned as he tugged at them. A cross between a gurgle and a scream came to life briefly at the top of Foggy’s windpipe and then died, stifled by a mouth that refused to birth it completely.

“I…I need a minute,” Foggy said, those words the worst sound of them all, and then stood up. Matt heard what he thought was probably Foggy rubbing at his eyes, trying to wake himself up from the nightmare Matt had inadvertently thrust him into. Footsteps led away from him and their door swung open and then closed. Matt trailed Foggy past it with his senses and into the bathroom they shared with that half of the hall.

Foggy was gone. Matt fell back onto his wrists.

It was hard to imagine Foggy coming back, or at least coming back the same. There were causes, and there were effects. Time’s arrow shot out one way and there was no reeling it back in. This was the unfortunate state of things. Matt would have to accept it. It was that simple.

He tried to tune Foggy out—leave him his privacy at least if not his sanity. But the telltale smack of hands against a face echoing in a bathroom stall reminded him that perhaps some things weren’t so simple after all.

For instance, how could he possibly go on pretending that the hierarchy behind intentions and desire didn’t apply to him? That the silence of their room outweighed Foggy’s muffled panic attack taking place willfully out of his reach? Matt’s chest contracted at each of Foggy’s fractured sobs. He shared them. He took them. He stole them.

He berated himself even as he did it. What good did it do to make off unnoticed like a pickpocket? But what choice did he have? This was how Foggy wanted it.

And Matt couldn’t blame him. If only shame could make up for anything. He’d taken God’s gift of his body and flung it back in His face. Maybe Foggy wasn’t religious enough to see it like that, but sometimes secular beliefs hung on just as stubborn. If not an affront to God he’d see it as an affront to his caring. And wasn’t that what it was? If he’d cared about Foggy at all he wouldn’t have stomped so callously on this one of his prized possessions. Matt might as well be a murderer.

Down the hall, the metal holder squealed as Foggy ripped a bunch of toilet paper from the roll and blew his nose loudly into it. That sound had always grated against Matt’s senses, but in this new context the disgust was reflexive. Everything found its origin in Matt, and wasn’t that his problem? He couldn’t step outside of himself for even one God damn second.

Even now, spying on Foggy wasn’t really about his wellbeing. It was about Matt’s own curiosity. His constant and compulsive need to know how Foggy was being affected by _him_. Matt inserted the knuckle of his forefinger between his teeth and allowed the sharp points of his incisors to chastise him. Foggy still didn’t even know about Matt’s senses and how much they’d elided his privacy. How much Matt had already violated him. Matt’s jaw clenched tighter around his knuckle. Blood pooled under his skin as his teeth set to work bursting the capillaries nearest to its surface.

The lock on the stall door jangled. Water from the tap rushed out in a stream and spattered against the porcelain of the sink. Wet hands patted themselves dry on Foggy’s jeans. Matt read all the signs; Foggy was coming back, but it could just as easily be to grab his jacket on the way out again. The doorknob turned. Snatching his finger from his mouth, Matt braced himself.

Foggy reentered the room wordlessly and—instead of either turning towards his closet or making for his bed to retreat into its safety like Matt had expected he might—walked in a straight line toward where he’d left Matt on the floor. Matt shrank back, and he hated that his body was full of tells.

Foggy dropped to his knees with a dull thud half-absorbed by the carpet. Matt recognized its signature in his own dully thudding pulse. His heart couldn’t even muster up a good show of uncertainty because he knew what was coming: Foggy was doing him the favor of a goodbye.

Matt sat there numbly as Foggy took his hands in his, like he was some maiden to be coddled. He registered an annoying prickle at the corners of his eyes now that he was no longer free to wipe it away. Here was yet another layer of control stripped away from him. Frantic to seize some back, he blurted out, “I know.”

Though he couldn’t identity what exactly tipped him off, he was almost certain that Foggy twisted his mouth in the short silence that followed. “Know what?” Foggy asked suspiciously.

“You know…,” Matt said, shrugging, unwilling to say it. The whole idea had been to make it so that the words continued to exist solely in the liminal space between truths that were known and truths that were spoken.

“I don’t, actually,” Foggy said, matter-of-fact, and then, determined not to let whatever Matt was going on about keep him from the thing he came to do, clasped Matt’s hands with a renewed firmness. “What I do know is this,” he announced, and Matt winced at how much like his regular self he sounded. Foggy was already over it—over him. Although the nagging awareness had been looming in the back of his mind since the moment of his confession that something, eventually, would wake Foggy up from his crush, it still stung. To be so fleeting, to be so unworthy of permanence or even a lasting impression? He already knew Foggy had carved out a place in his chest. He supposed he just hadn’t been skilled enough with his blade to do the same.

Foggy continued. “I know that you are good, Matt. That you deserve nice things. That you don’t deserve to feel the things that made you feel the need to—to do _that_. Look, I’m not good at this,” he hedged, and Matt couldn’t stop himself from heading him off again.

“Then don’t,” he said. Consistency wasn’t his forte tonight, but maybe it didn’t have to be; if skipping to the end of it hadn’t worked then switching tactics to prevent its happening at all might be the best call he could make.

“Matt, what—”

“No, really. We don’t have to do this. We can just—we can pretend it never happened. You never…and I never….” He trailed off when it became obvious he couldn’t go on without his voice cracking. He realized too late that he was already crying. That tears in his eyes threatened to roll down his cheeks.

Foggy held steady his grip on Matt’s shaking hands. “Matt, I don’t _want_ to pretend it never happened. We—we need to acknowledge it. This isn’t healthy. I—”

“I _told_ you in the beginning I wasn’t good for you. I _knew_ that if you knew you would think twice.” Matt’s volume was rising. “If you had listened to me you wouldn’t be about to take it all back!” He tried to shove away from Foggy but found himself losing against his unyielding hold.

Foggy raised his voice in order to best Matt there, too. “Matt! Matthew! Jesus fucking Christ, will you let me speak for myself?”

“What’s the point?” Matt asked, and what little of the dejection he’d thus far managed to keep suppressed burbled to the surface in those three short words.

“The point, if you would let me get to it,” Foggy said through gritted teeth, “is that I don’t fucking care if it’s weird or too soon or we haven’t gone through the requisite steps—no, keep your fucking mouth _shut_ , Murdock. You will let me finish or so help me God.”

Matt could no longer follow what was happening. Whatever it was Foggy seemed to be leading up to with his speech didn’t appear to be the breakup Matt had anticipated, but the anger radiating off Foggy was nevertheless unmistakable.

Matt recognized it in the sound of Foggy shaking his head, and hard, as he said, “God, where was I? Right. I don’t care if this freaks you out and sends you running for the hills. I’m not gonna let myself worry about being too much. Because you need to hear this. You. Matthew Murdock.”

Foggy lifted Matt’s hands upwards, and Matt wrestled with the urge to try wrenching them away again; it was hard to trust when he still didn’t know what fate awaited him. But fate has a way of leading you to it with a soft touch, and it was the soft press of Foggy’s lips to the back of each of Matt’s hands that led him to his.

“I love you,” Foggy said, enunciating each word so that there was no confusing the degree to which he meant them. He took advantage of Matt’s sitting in stunned silence to elaborate. “I do not care how broken you think you are. You mean something to me, Matt, and I’ll be damned before I let you invalidate that. You might not have asked for it, but I’m here for you. I’ll _be_ here for you till the day you say you don’t need me anymore and actually mean it.”

Matt swallowed. He hadn’t been prepared to receive Foggy’s first confession either, but this one was of an entirely different caliber. He’d encountered them before, of course, in books and in a few of the movies Foggy had convinced him to sit through. He realized, now, though, that as much as they’d been supposed to form a template of sorts, he was very much on his own here. No pre-packaged lines came to him; in fact, none came to him at all. “I—I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. Just let me love you. That’s all I ask.” Foggy reconsidered. “Actually, no. I’m not asking for permission,” he amended.

A lump formed in Matt’s throat. One of the tears that hadn’t quite managed to gather the momentum to spill over his eyelid did so now. If he didn’t do something about it, he was really going to start crying. Matt took stock of his options and came up short. The way he figured it, he could either hold his breath and hope that would be enough to make himself pass out, or he could entice Foggy to close his eyes against his tears with an impassioned kiss.

In the end it wasn’t that hard of a decision to make. Matt didn’t have far to lean, and Foggy met him halfway anyway. Light fingers caressed his cheeks at first, and Matt assumed that they were starting over from the top: tentative and all tenderness. A blistering kiss set the record straight.

The heat blazing behind Foggy’s lips scorched Matt’s. There were no steadying hands this time to help with balance, only ones scrabbling to get Matt out of Foggy’s shirt without breaking their kiss. It came off with a decisive tug. His glasses went with it. Foggy’s fingertips grazed Matt’s chest, and goose bumps rippled out across his skin in their wake. It was a gentle touch until it wasn’t and there was power behind it and carpet at Matt’s back. Foggy moved into place above Matt. His hair fell forward from behind his ears, brushing Matt’s cheeks. He swept it back only for it to come loose again. “One sec,” he said. There was a pause and then the elastic in the hair tie he kept around his wrist snapped as it came off.

Matt waited with bated breath as Foggy tied his hair back, and he redirected his sensory focus away from the rough carpet fibers forming their impressions into his back and toward the feel of Foggy’s legs flush against his hips where he straddled them. The instructions “let me love you” still echoed in his head, and he wanted, with his everything, to follow them. For once, Matt wanted to lose himself, to cut the line tying him to the shore of his worst insecurities. To stow away on another ship headed for some other land entirely. To put his faith in another captain. He could do that, couldn’t he?

“That’s better. Hmm, now where were we?” Foggy said, his tone affected and broadcasting false innocence. He lowered his face back to Matt’s, and for a second Matt thought he might have escaped the inevitable punch line when Foggy veered off the course he’d set for Matt’s lips and instead kissed Matt chastely on the forehead. They both giggled, and Foggy fell onto his elbows and buried his face in Matt’s neck when the giggles overpowered him. Matt held him in close until both of them had finally stopped shaking.

“You’re awful, you know that?” Matt told the top of Foggy’s head, only for it to retreat from the crook of his neck seemingly offended.

“I do believe I wasn’t the only one laughing,” Foggy pointed out.

“Those were pity laughs,” Matt tried to say, but he didn’t get far before his claim was undercut by more of his own traitorous laughter.

“Sure,” said Foggy, wholly unconvinced. “I’m not sure the jury’s buying it, though.” He lifted his upper body off of Matt’s torso with a push of his palms against the floor and settled himself on his side next to Matt. With his freer hand, he cupped Matt’s jaw. “But don’t feel bad, Matty,” he breathed, face inching closer to Matt’s as his words slowed. “Even if you insist on defaming me you won’t dissuade me from doing this for much longer….”

Foggy pressed his lips hungrily to Matt’s, and Matt didn’t need much more prompting than that to reciprocate. He found Foggy’s ass and cupped it over his jeans, pulling Foggy in closer to him. He dropped his lower lip slightly to let Foggy work his mouth further open. He groaned when Foggy drew his face in impossibly closer with a strong hand at the base of his skull. And he met Foggy’s tongue with his own when it ventured in past his lips.

They moved their bodies closer together in a frantic bid for purchase. Matt slotted his leg in between Foggy’s, eager to bring his hips closer to where Foggy’s body heat burned hottest and brightest. Foggy’s breath hitched in his throat when Matt’s thigh grazed his half-hard dick, and the noise sent a jolt of satisfaction vibrating through Matt. It was part Foggy feeling good because of him, part the thrill of discovery; they had so much to explore together if they were really doing this. Foggy could be Matt’s future.

Foggy was also Matt’s present, and the way his fingers dug into the skin under Matt’s shoulder blade reminded Matt he had yet to work Foggy’s shirt off of him. As Foggy wriggled out of it, Matt fumbled with the button on his jeans—it was a lot harder unfastening buttons in the opposite direction. When he’d succeeded at last he pushed down on the waist of the jeans in unspoken encouragement for Foggy to take them the rest of the way off himself. Foggy hooked a finger over the edge of Matt’s pants near the inside of his hip and pulled him back in for a quick tease of his lower lip before obliging.

The denim rasped against Foggy’s legs on the way down. “Are you leaving yours on?” he asked.

Matt took the hint, and, both their pants now tossed aside, they agreed to move things to the closest bed. Climbing awkwardly onto it in the lull they’d created, Matt fought against the doubts that were starting to creep back into his head. If he allowed himself this weakness—if he gave in to vague possibilities of happiness, wouldn’t it hurt all the more when Foggy eventually discovered whichever part of him it was that was too much, too unlovable, too loathsome? A surge of dizziness threatened to overtake him. He fisted the bed sheets and bit his lip. _“Let me love you.”_ The words—Foggy’s words—rang out again in his memory like the refrain to a song only he could hear, but he needed more than a ghost. He latched onto Foggy’s heartbeat, which, while fast with excitement and nerves, beat sure and true. Matt wasn’t alone.

He kissed Foggy’s mouth again, ran his hands over Foggy’s shoulders and down his chest, reveled in the intricacies of Foggy’s skin and the swirls of his body hair. Foggy’s lips pulled away from his, and then there were teeth scraping Matt’s neck just underneath his jaw and shooting sparks of pleasure down his body. Matt shivered as Foggy sucked the tender skin there. He marveled at how little the bruise Foggy was coaxing to the surface resembled the one he’d bitten into his knuckle earlier. That one had been a punishment where this one was a gift. He yielded to Foggy’s tongue and the wave of sensation bidden by it, hands still where they lay for the moment on Foggy’s shoulders.

And then Foggy had departed from his neck and was planting a trail of kisses from his collarbone to his nipple, the spot above his navel to the corner of his hip like a rogue gardener with the world’s softest spade. Matt quivered as Foggy’s mouth traveled over him blooming roses. He tangled his fingers in Foggy’s hair, now half come undone from its bun. Matt, too, was about to unravel and Foggy hadn’t even gotten his boxers off.

A fingernail traced his waistband and Foggy hummed thoughtfully, sending a stream of balmy air flowing out over Matt’s skin. “Would it, uh, would it be cool if I blew you right now?”

Foggy’s question startled a laugh out of Matt.

“Hey, don’t laugh,” Foggy admonished him. “Consent is sexy.”

“Agreed.” There _was_ something undeniably sexy about Foggy voicing certain intentions Matt would like him to follow through on. “Please do, by the way. It would be very cool.”

Matt lifted his hips off the bed so Foggy could get his boxers off. They slipped down his legs easily, and just like that he was exposed. He raised an open palm and, Foggy, having read his intentions, threaded his fingers through Matt’s. It was so simple. If he stuck out his hand, he could trust Foggy to take it. Even if there was dirt under his fingernails and his skin was cracked and dry.

If asked to pinpoint it later, Matt would say he made his decision then and there. But the truth was that it had been a foregone conclusion from the start. He had longed for this for the better part of two years—a longing charged up like some superpower with every quip of Foggy’s, every laugh, sigh, and somber shower ballad of Foggy’s. It was only natural that it would ultimately overpower his fear, and it was time to put it into words.

“Foggy…I want to give us a shot.”

A sharp intake of breath came from somewhere near Matt’s belly. “Yeah?” Foggy said from his position there, a hopeful lilt to his voice.

“Yeah,” said Matt firmly, and he gave Foggy’s hand a squeeze.

“Good.” Foggy kissed the inside of his thighs, and a deep ache set in just above them. “Okay, I’m going in,” he informed Matt.

Matt snorted. “You know, you—you don’t have to announce it,” he said between gasps for air.

“Got you to laugh, didn’t I?”

“I thought you didn’t want me to laugh,” Matt reminded him.

“Yeah, well, that was at least a minute ago.” A few loose strands of his hair swished against his shoulder as he shrugged, and then those same strands tickled Matt as Foggy took him into his mouth.

It was like nothing he’d ever felt before. Wet and fire all at once—ebb and flow and churning magma. Foggy’s tongue ignited the tinder in his belly, and he clutched at the sheets with his free hand. He bit down on his lip, but a moan escaped him. Foggy’s fingers dug into the skin at his thigh, and Matt went light-headed. He wasn’t sure how long he was expected to last, but every pass of Foggy’s tongue made it clearer he probably wasn’t going to meet those expectations. Foggy picked up the pace, and Matt’s back arched of its own accord. He was doomed.

Foggy stroked him rhythmically, mouth working up and down. The sweet tang of his own precum hit the air. He inhaled as far as his shaky lungs would allow him in pursuit of Foggy’s arousal. He found it bound up in sweat, in saliva, and in the slow and deliberate grinding of Foggy’s pelvis against the bed. He was close now.

Foggy’s hand wandered up Matt’s chest and etched temporary red paths back down it again. It traced the coarse hair of his happy trail, feather-light, and finally came to rest at the base of his dick. All at once the thick wall of pressure that had been building there came to a head. Matt shuddered. His hips jerked upwards to meet Foggy’s lips, and he came in a searing flash of rapture. Spent, all the tension in his muscles melted away. He slumped back onto the bed.

Foggy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Okay?” he asked.

It took Matt a second to come out of his daze to respond. “That was _more_ than okay. Like a lot more,” he said, and sat up to kiss Foggy in a way that left him panting. Low, into Foggy’s ear, he whispered, “Now it’s my turn to love _you_.”

* * *

Matt and Foggy lay on Foggy’s bed, legs entwined and arms wrapped around each other. Matt nuzzled his nose into Foggy’s neck below his chin and breathed in, stirring up a whirl of intimate smells and sounds from his immediate memory. Like this, warm and sated and _together_ , Matt felt secure in a way he never had. He had a partner; he had _Foggy_. He had someone to fight on behalf of his faults, and, looking back, maybe a fair fight was all he ever needed.

Foggy massaged the back of Matt’s scalp while they lay there in comfortable silence. His lower jaw came down onto the top of Matt’s head as he opened his mouth to speak. “Not to ruin the mood,” he said, clearing his throat mildly, “but can I ask you something? It’s nothing heavy, I promise.”

Matt snuggled in further to Foggy, pressing his closed eyes into Foggy’s collar bone and tightening the arm he had thrown around Foggy’s plush waist. “Yeah?” he mumbled, and whether he was granting permission or expressing unease, not even Matt was sure.

“Are we….” Foggy’s fingers stopped their circular movement through his hair and his voice got small. “When you said ‘give us a shot’ did you mean— Does this make us— Am I allowed to call you my boyfriend?”

A smile unfurled across Matt’s face, and he hoped that Foggy could read it where it played out against the soft skin of his chest. He broke it to place a kiss there, but it didn’t stay gone. Releasing Foggy, he scooted back some so that Foggy could see his face. Still smiling like an idiot, he said, “I have an idea.”

Foggy groaned in bemusement. “You know that doesn’t answer my question, right?” he said.

“Shhh, just hear me out,” Matt said, taking one of Foggy’s hands and kissing it. “What if…we redid it? Like you say the same thing you did the first time and I say yes this time instead of freaking out.”

“You’re a dork,” Foggy told him fondly. “But okay. Here goes.” Foggy wiggled his shoulders and took a deep breath. “Matt, I have something I need to get off my chest.”

“What is it, Fogs?” Matt asked and immediately noted to himself that he needed acting lessons because he couldn’t keep the roleplay out of his voice the way Foggy somehow managed to.

“I like you. A lot. In a more than best friends way. In an I-wanna-be-your-boyfriend-if-you’ll-let-me way. So I guess this is me asking you out. Will you go out with me?”

The wording hadn’t changed much. Neither had the sentiment. They were in the same room; it was the same night. And yet Matt’s whole universe had shifted. They and he still had things to work through, issues yet unaddressed like Matt’s senses for one, but his problems no longer seemed like the death sentence they once had. Matt could trust that even as he peeled back his hood and revealed the scarred face underneath, Foggy would take him into his arms and kiss his brow all the same.

“Foggy, I’d be honored.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic means a lot to me, so I truly cannot express how much I would appreciate any sort of comment if you enjoyed it!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [You Would Never Call Me Baby (Podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29979033) by [inkforhumanhands](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkforhumanhands/pseuds/inkforhumanhands)




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